NASA is building a new space telescope to search for life on nearby planets. What would it see on ancient Earth?

space.com Jun 10, 2026

NASA is building a new space telescope to search for life on nearby planets. What would it see on ancient Earth?

Curated by Shubham · TechCapsules · Jun 10, 2026

AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication

NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory is a new space telescope designed to directly image Earth-like planets around nearby stars and analyze the light reflecting off their atmospheres for signs of life. A recent study has analyzed the telescope's spectral resolution, determining the level of detail needed to confidently spot biosignatures in a planet's atmosphere. The study found that the telescope would need a visible-light resolving power of about 140 to detect molecular oxygen and a near-infrared resolving power of at least 40 to distinguish between carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

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Loft Orbital's YAM-9 spacecraft successfully demonstrated the first publicly disclosed execution of a vision-language model in orbit. Aboard the spacecraft, Google DeepMind's Gemma 3 performed natural language queries, classified Earth imagery, and produced plain-English summaries without transmitting raw pixels to the ground. This achievement marks a significant shift in the value layer of Earth observation, moving from ground-based processing to onboard inference capabilities. The model, running on an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX graphics processing unit, utilized a software harness developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to fit within the spacecraft's memory budget and processing constraints.

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spacenews.com · Jun 17

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spacenews.com · Jun 17

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space.com · Jun 17

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